Adopting order (Doc. 14) reciting the magistrate judge's findings that the court lacks personal jurisdiction, that "the defendants have virtually no business in or connection with Pennsylvania," and that Tufano "failed to allege any of the defendants' conduct that was 'expressly aimed' at the Commonwealth." Objections were overruled as "unavailing," the motion was granted, the temporary restraining order denied and the case closed. The underlying report and recommendation (Doc. 12) applies the Calder effects test and records that "Tufano's complaint alleges that the Taban Defendants worked to stop Tufano from speaking out about his surgery in California." The findings recorded here are the magistrate judge's, as recited in the adopting order, which was signed by District Judge Joseph F. Saporito, Jr. Neither document states whether the dismissal is with or without prejudice.
July 31, 2026 ruling source — govinfo.gov ↗Tufano v. Eriksson et al
3:26-cv-01016 · U.S. District Court, Middle District of Pennsylvania
About this case
Evidentiary treatment: This summarizes the plaintiff's own allegations as stated in the complaint or docket record cited below. It reflects what was filed, not a court finding, and is not a determination that the allegations are true.
Plaintiff, pro se, alleges he hired defendant Anthony Eriksson to distribute flyers outside Dr. Mehryar Ray Taban's Beverly Hills office to "spread awareness of medical malpractice" arising from a surgery Taban performed on him that he was dissatisfied with; he alleges that after several months of tracking Eriksson's location he found Eriksson was no longer distributing flyers as assigned, which he attributes to Dr.
Taban or an associate influencing Eriksson to stop, and that after firing Eriksson he began receiving text messages from multiple numbers and saw videos posted about him on social media, which he characterizes as an "organized gangstalking operation." The complaint pleads seven claims total; as to the Taban defendants it asserts civil conspiracy, tortious interference, theft of services, and a First Amendment free-speech violation, seeking compensatory and punitive damages, and separately sought a TRO barring defendants from contacting the flyer-distribution employees. A narrower sub-thread of the DSP001 Taban dispute cluster than C035/C046/C053/C066 — Eriksson-specific, not the broader malpractice/Equal-Protection theory — though it traces to the same underlying dissatisfaction with Taban's November 2023 surgery.
Defendants
- Anthony Eriksson
- Mehryar Taban MD Inc
- Mehryar Ray Taban MD
Source record
This page separates court/ruling records, party filings, research classifications, secondary sources and public statements. Unknown or unresolved fields remain labelled as such.
Outcome and research status
Outcome reason: A Report & Recommendation (July 9, 2026) recommended granting defendants' Rule 12(b)(2) motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction and denying Tufano's TRO motion; Tufano objected July 20, 2026; the court adopted the R&R on July 31, 2026, granted the motion to dismiss, denied the TRO, and directed the clerk to close the case. Tufano filed a Notice of Appeal and an in-forma-pauperis-on-appeal motion Aug. 5, 2026; the appeal was docketed August 6, 2026 as Third Circuit No. 26-2996. Appellees (Anthony Eriksson, Mehryar Ray Taban MD, and Mehryar Taban MD Inc.) entered an appearance through counsel Kimberly D. Borland on August 6, 2026, and the appellate record was transmitted from the district court's CM/ECF the same day. Update 2026-08-25: The adopting order (Doc. 14, July 31, 2026) and the report and recommendation (Doc. 12) were both read in full, upgrading this record from a docket snapshot. The order recites that the magistrate judge "found that the court lacks personal jurisdiction... that the defendants have virtually no business in or connection with Pennsylvania, and that the plaintiff failed to allege any of the defendants' conduct that was 'expressly aimed' at the Commonwealth," overrules Tufano's objections as "unavailing," grants the motion, denies the temporary restraining order and closes the case. The recommendation applies the Calder effects test and notes that "Tufano's complaint alleges that the Taban Defendants worked to stop Tufano from speaking out about his surgery in California." Reading both documents confirms the caveat already recorded here: neither states whether the dismissal is with or without prejudice, and neither mentions leave to amend or transfer.
Research status: Source-backed (report and recommendation and adopting order both read in full via GovInfo)
Research notes: Docket snapshot (R&R-adoption and dismissal read from docket entry description, not full order text). Third Circuit appeal docket (26-2996) independently confirmed via Justia; appellate docket shows entry of appearance by appellees' counsel and record transmittal, both Aug. 6, 2026; no docket activity past Aug. 6, 2026 as of Justia's last retrieval that date. Appeal docket: https://dockets.justia.com/docket/circuit-courts/ca3/26-2996
Related litigation
- Dispute group: Taban / eye-surgery-related litigation
Court & ruling records
Findings recorded only where they are tied to an order, opinion or report and recommendation.
Record labels distinguish final orders/opinions, reports and recommendations, non-final orders, and tentative/indexed ruling records.
Appellate history
Appeals taken from this docket record, with what the research does and does not establish about each.
Taking an appeal is a party’s filing, not a ruling — only an appellate court’s own disposition is a finding, and a disposition recorded here is a docket fact rather than reasoning unless the order itself was read. An appeal continues the action it arises from, so appeals are never counted as additional lawsuits: the case and originating-action counts published elsewhere on this site are unaffected by this section. Where a docket number or a current status is not recorded, that is a stated gap in the research, not a finding that none exists. See Methodology.
Appeal from the order of 2026-07-31 adopting the report and recommendation, granting the Rule 12(b)(2) motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction, denying the temporary restraining order and closing the case. Re-checked 2026-09-10 against the Third Circuit's own mirrored docket: docketed 2026-08-06, with an entry of appearance filed the same day by Kimberly D. Borland for the appellees, no later entry and no termination date. Re-checked 2026-09-10. The Third Circuit's own docket is mirrored on CourtListener, but only through its case-opening entries, and it records no termination date. No disposition appears in any free public source, and the M.D. Pa. district docket - where a Third Circuit order or mandate would be entered on its return - is mirrored in RECAP only through 2026-07-31 and carries no appellate entry. The appeal is therefore recorded as pending on the strength of an open appellate docket rather than a read disposition.
Record source — courtlistener.com ↗Filing-restriction indicators
Strength labels are research classifications, not judicial declarations that the litigant is vexatious.
C071 (Tufano v. Eriksson et al.) named Anthony Eriksson and Taban-affiliated defendants Mehryar Ray Taban MD and Mehryar Taban MD Inc., who also appear as defendants in the original transferred Taban malpractice action (C046). The district court adopted a Report & Recommendation dismissing C071 for lack of personal jurisdiction and denied a TRO motion; Tufano's appeal was docketed at the Third Circuit as No. 26-2996 on Aug. 6, 2026.
Source — courtlistener.com ↗Chronology events
Sequence does not by itself prove motive or causation.
C071 (Tufano v. Eriksson et al., naming Anthony Eriksson, Mehryar Ray Taban MD, and Mehryar Taban MD Inc.) was dismissed for lack of personal jurisdiction after the district court adopted a Report & Recommendation and denied Tufano's TRO motion.
Source — courtlistener.com ↗Tufano's appeal of the C071 dismissal was docketed at the Third Circuit as No. 26-2996; appellees (Anthony Eriksson, Mehryar Ray Taban MD, Mehryar Taban MD Inc.) entered an appearance through counsel Kimberly D. Borland, and the district court record was transmitted via CM/ECF, both the same day.
Source — courtlistener.com ↗Public video statements
Public statements are displayed separately from court findings. Quotations are transcribed from the video’s own YouTube auto-generated captions and timestamped from the caption cues covering the passage quoted. The Strong / Moderate / Context tier is this project’s research classification of how closely a statement bears on the documented filing patterns — it is not a judicial finding. Any second badge names the filing-restriction factor the statement’s own words describe; it records what the speaker said, not that a court found it.
How quotations are marked: An ellipsis (…) inside a quotation marks words left out between two passages of the same video, which can sit some minutes apart. The omitted wording is not reproduced here, and a clip on the statement supercut plays the whole span from the quotation’s first word to its last — so it includes the omitted material. Quotations without an ellipsis are continuous speech.
away well Frank if you didn't spend $60,000 to get your eyes gouged out you could have bought a new Skillet too you're right
The only eye-surgery-dispute content in fifty minutes, and it is a figure. It conflicts with everything already recorded and is not reconciled: earlier research has the same surgery bill at "30,000 to 38,000" (one video) and at a digit-doubled "$88,000" (its companion), and this video — four months earlier than either — says $60,000. A $60,000 figure appears three times elsewhere in the dataset and all three are false positives: two in the claims-summary record — C016's "potato chip manufacturing line for approximately $60,000" (Alibaba) and its damages figure — and one in the statement record, a house-repair job in the Meagher insurance matter. The eye-surgery $60,000 is untracked. Under this research's standing rule, numbers spoken on camera are the least reliable content the archive carries; all four figures are recorded and none is preferred.
Watch at 38:16 — youtube.com ↗And he's still hiring shills in these comments. You can go look on all the recent videos I posted to defend him and try to blame me and say, "I shouldn't have gotten this or I shouldn't have gotten that."
The paid-commenter allegation, seven days earlier than another researched video (2025-05-06) that puts it as "Dr. Taban continues to hire these Illuminati gangstalkers to leave comments on my video." Two independent datings of the same allegation, 2025-04-29 and 2025-05-06. It is also the closest thing located in this research to the "organized gangstalking operation" pleaded in C071 (Tufano v. Eriksson et al, M.D. Pa. 3:26-cv-01016) — though that complaint was not filed until 2026-04-20, nearly a year later, and concerns text messages and social-media videos rather than YouTube comments. No source is offered for the hiring allegation and this research takes no position on it. The passage in quotation marks is his paraphrase of commenters, not a read-aloud of any specific comment.
Why this classification: A dated on-camera allegation that the surgeon is paying commenters to defend him, tied by subject matter to the eye-surgery grievance but describing no case, court, filing or ruling.
Watch at 00:59 — youtube.com ↗this doctor thinks he can wipe me off social media, I will hire people to hand out flyers full-time until every single person in Beverly Hills sees what you did to my face.
A dated, first-person, conditional-retaliatory statement of the leafleting campaign — "if this doctor thinks he can wipe me off social media, I will hire people" — tying the leafleting directly to the deplatforming rather than to the surgery. Its research value is the location: the campaign is elsewhere in this research explicitly located in Beverly Hills, but without a date on that anchor. This video, 2025-07-11, is the earliest explicit "Beverly Hills" placement located so far — 30 days before a 2025-08-10 video ("forced to hire people to hand out flyers in Los Angeles") and 44 days before a 2025-08-24 video. The mechanism, written out so the call can be checked: paid distribution of flyers, full-time and indefinitely, saturating the geographic market of a named tracked defendant's practice, with the stated aim that "every single person in Beverly Hills" learns of the alleged outcome. The pressure described is reputational and commercial, aimed at the practice's patient base — publicity, not litigation or an opponent's legal spend — and the Strong rubric requires filing conduct, so the tier is Moderate.
Why this classification: A dated, first-person commitment to hire full-time leafleters in Beverly Hills in response to the alleged deplatforming; the pressure described is publicity aimed at a surgeon's patient base, not litigation, so no filing-conduct factor applies.
Watch at 00:43 — youtube.com ↗So I mean if if my eyes can't be fixed then I'm going to be outside of this guy's office for the rest of my life. And if my face is ruined and my vision is ruined for the rest of my life, there is no reasonable amount of money that I can be compensated
A first-person, open-ended commitment to maintain a physical presence outside the defendant surgeon's office, conditioned on the injury not being repaired. This is the same pressure campaign the archive documents at length elsewhere — flyers handed out outside the Beverly Hills office by people he pays (0gFaSUF9Cak [1:01], published three weeks later, states it is already funded and running; LpQS6Vn9XDg (2025-08-10) and 90nJ2ONOMfs (2025-08-16) describe being "forced to hire people to hand out flyers" a fortnight earlier) — and that arrangement is the subject of C071 (Tufano v. Eriksson, M.D. Pa. 3:26-cv-01016, filed 2026-04-20), whose claims summary records hiring the defendant to distribute flyers outside Dr. Taban's Beverly Hills office. Tier: Moderate (Cost imposition as stated motive) Why that factor, written out so the call is auditable. Under the archive's settled treatment, leafleting and other non-litigation pressure takes Cost imposition as stated motive but tiers Moderate, not Strong, because the Strong rubric requires filing conduct and the cost mechanism here is the pressure campaign, not a lawsuit. This quote is at the softer end of that category and the alternative label No filing-conduct factor was genuinely considered: he does not say the point is to make the surgeon spend money or to put him out of business — he frames the presence as what happens if he is not fixed. It is classified with the rest of the campaign because the mechanism is identical (indefinite adverse presence at the defendant's place of business, imposing a cost on the practice) and because splitting one campaign across two factors would make the dataset less traceable, not more. A promotion pass that disagrees should re-label it No filing-conduct factor; nothing else in this file depends on the choice. It is a research classification of what the speaker said — never a court finding, never a vexatious-litigant determination.
Why this classification: An open-ended, conditional commitment to stand outside the surgeon's office indefinitely if his vision cannot be repaired, describing physical presence rather than any court filing.
Watch at 00:46 — youtube.com ↗And you will understand when I say I will spend the rest of my life handing out flyers outside of this guy's office.
A first-person, indefinite-duration commitment to leaflet outside a medical practice. It sits inside a motif the dataset already tracks across roughly a dozen researched statements, several of which record the campaign as actually paid for and running. This one is earlier than most of them. Why Moderate and not Strong, written out so the call is auditable: the pressure mechanism here is leafleting, not filing. Cost imposition is the operative consideration because other researched statements in this same campaign state the object explicitly as making the surgeon lose money, but the Strong rubric requires filing conduct and none is described in this sentence. Note also that this particular sentence does not itself name money as the motive — the cost framing is inherited from the surrounding campaign, and a reader should treat the classification as a description of the tactic, not as a paraphrase of what he said here.
Why this classification: An indefinite first-person commitment to leaflet outside the surgeon's office - an out-of-court pressure tactic stated twelve days before the dataset's first record of the campaign being paid for - which mentions no money, no case and no filing.
Watch at 00:26 — youtube.com ↗I have spent all of my savings hiring people to hand out flyers in Beverly Hills. Hand out flyers in different cities of what this guy did to my face because that is the only thing you can do.
A first-person statement that the flyer campaign outside the surgeon's Beverly Hills office is already paid for and running, and has expanded to other cities. The same arrangement is the subject of C071, whose claims summary records him hiring the defendant to distribute flyers there.
Why this classification: He says he has spent his savings hiring leafleters in Beverly Hills so that no one uses the surgeon, which names commercial harm as the aim but leafleting - not a filing - as the instrument, so it carries no filing-conduct factor.
Watch at 00:58 — youtube.com ↗At this point, I've spent all my money, all my savings for my business. Every aspect of my life has been completely ruined. And that's partially due to these people, these psychopathic doctors going after me personally and my family and my business for exposing what they've done to me.
A damages statement combined with an allegation of retaliation for speaking publicly, the same theory pleaded about seven months later in the Eriksson action. Recorded as a party allegation offered without source; no court has found any of it.
Why this classification: The value here is chronological, a public statement of the retaliation theory before the case pleading it existed; the statement describes conduct he attributes to others rather than any filing of his own, so it is Moderate.
Watch at 00:16 — youtube.com ↗which is why I hired two people to stand outside Dr. Tibbon's office and hand out flyers of my face for the rest of this doctor's life. Because I'm I'm ruling out the factors. They control the court system. They control everything. Okay, fine. I don't really care what happens in court because at the end of the day, all of these scumbag doctors are going to lose tens of millions of dollars.
Confirms in his own words that he hired two people to hand out flyers outside the surgeon's office for the rest of that doctor's life, dating the campaign to on or before publication, and states that the court outcome does not matter to him because the doctors will lose tens of millions of dollars.
Why this classification: He says the opposing side controls the court system and that this is why he hired two people to leaflet outside the office instead - a forum-bias allegation given as his reason for choosing publicity over litigation, so the cost he describes is imposed by leafleting rather than by any filing.
Watch at 00:07 — youtube.com ↗So basically, I now have to file another lawsuit against Dr. Don and this employee for conspiring together to commit time fraud, which is uh is it's actually a criminal action.
Announces a lawsuit he has not yet filed against the surgeon and the contractor he hired, on a theory he describes as conspiracy to commit time fraud. A tracked case against those parties was filed four days after this video was published; the contractor is never named on camera.
Why this classification: A filing announced but not yet made is a prospective filing, which is not one of the three core factors, so the statement cannot reach Strong however closely the later docket matches it.
Watch at 01:16 — youtube.com ↗And this is why I joke I should just go outside Dr. Dr. Bond's [caption garble] office and hand out flyers the rest of my life
A restatement of the flyer campaign outside the surgeon's Beverly Hills office. That arrangement is the subject of C071 (*Tufano v. Eriksson et al*, M.D. Pa. 3:26-cv-01016, filed 2026-04-20), whose claims summary pleads that he hired Anthony Eriksson to distribute flyers outside Dr. Taban's Beverly Hills office. Cost imposed by leafleting is out-of-court publicity pressure, not litigation cost, so it takes `No filing-conduct factor` under the published rule. The archive already holds two earlier statements of the same campaign (`kbVrx17dWq8`, 2024-09-14, advertising it as paid work; `sYzPmXG7iBs`, 2025-10-16); this is a third restatement, published 45 days after C071 was dismissed on 2026-07-31 (2026-07-31 → 2026-09-14 = 45 days). He frames it as a joke here.
Watch at 00:54 — youtube.com ↗Related video research
Each video has its own research page with its verified publish date, timestamped statements and case links. A researched link between a video and a docket record is not a finding of causation in either direction.
- STILL BOTCHED AS HELL 3 Years Later…Watch on YouTube — youtube.com ↗
- Dr. Taban STOLE MY EMPLOYEE?! 🤣Watch on YouTube — youtube.com ↗
- 6 Years of GANGSTALKING by who?!Watch on YouTube — youtube.com ↗
- Was this Corrupt Freemason Judge PAID OFF BY DR. TABAN!?Watch on YouTube — youtube.com ↗
- NEVER GET ANY PLASTIC SURGERY! Doctors can’t fix mistakes!!!Watch on YouTube — youtube.com ↗
- Court System Screws Over Woman WHOS SKIN MELTED OFF!!!Watch on YouTube — youtube.com ↗
- He was the “Best” Eye Doctor!? ACCORDING TO WHO?Watch on YouTube — youtube.com ↗
- I just want my EYES FIXED and FAIR CompensationWatch on YouTube — youtube.com ↗
- Dr. Taban gets me BANNED ON TIKTOK for showing my BOTCHED FACEWatch on YouTube — youtube.com ↗
- BOTCHEDWatch on YouTube — youtube.com ↗
- LA Restaurant Vlog #3 - BaltaireWatch on YouTube — youtube.com ↗
Cite this page
Frank Tufano Litigation Research. "Tufano v. Eriksson et al (3:26-cv-01016)". Research last verified September 23, 2026. https://suedbyfranktufano.com/cases/3-26-cv-01016-tufano-v-eriksson-et-al/